CAAM team wins the SIAM ‘100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge’

BY ANN LUGG
Special to the Rice News

A group of graduate students from the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) took a first-place spot in a challenge, dubbed the ”100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge,” posed by a mathematics professor at Oxford University and sponsored by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). CAAM department chair Bill Symes, described the team’s feat in an announcement to his department:

”In the January/February 2002 issue of SIAM News, Prof. Nick Trefethen of Oxford proposed a suite of 10 diabolically nasty numerical problems. Each problem demands the computation of a single number. Each problem is ‘solved’ to Trefethen’s satisfaction with the submission of 10 correct decimal digits, so a complete solution to the suite consists of 100 digits. (The ‘100 Dollar’ part is Trefethen’s promise to pay the winners a buck a digit.)

”Ninety-four teams from 25 countries entered the competition. The CAAM team — graduate students Eric Dussaud, Chris Husband, Hoang Nguyen and Dan Reynolds and postdoctoral research associate Chris Stolk, advised by Mark Embree, assistant professor, and Yin Zhang, associate professor, both in applied mathematics — submitted 100 correct digits (actually, considerably more than 100), thereby joining 19 other teams from around the world as first-place winners.

”These were truly difficult computations: Achieving 10-digit accuracy with any feasible expenditure of computational effort required in all cases clever and subtle approaches. The CAAM team deserves hearty congratulations for a very impressive piece of work.”
The original challenge and the problems are accessible online at < www.siam.org/siamnews/01-02/challenge.pdf >, but a sample problem is listed in the box at right. The solutions and list of the first- and second-place winners is online at < http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/nick.trefethen/hundred.html >. The solutions the Rice team submitted, as well as the team members’ approaches to solving the problems, is accessible at < www.caam.rice.edu/caam/trs/2002/TR02-06.pdf >.

Nick Trefethen is a professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at Oxford University. Each year, he assigns his new doctoral students in numerical analysis one problem per week for six weeks. The problems are stated in a sentence or two and each has an answer that is a single real number. The students’ mission is to compute that number to as many digits of precision as they can. The problems from this ”Problem-Solving Squad” class were used in the ”100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge.”

SIAM is an international organization with 9,000 members in academia, industry and government laboratories. The society’s goal is to advance the application of mathematics and computational science to science, engineering, industry and society, and to promote research that could lead to effective new mathematical and computational methods and techniques for science, engineering, industry and society.

— Ann Lugg is the senior department administrator for the Computer and Information Technology Institute and editor for the office of the dean of engineering.